Moments
by amandajbruce
Summary: In which Lilly reflects on her friendship with Oliver. Set between seaasons two and three.


Moments

Four months. He had been dating Joanie for four months. If she had to be honest, Lilly never thought they would last more than a couple of weeks, tops. She really thought Oliver would get sick of her. How could he possibly still be interested in Joanie? It made no sense.

She had none of the things he looked for in a girl. She never really cared about the world around her, not like Sarah. Sure, Joanie was health conscious, but only so far as it would mean she would be faster, stronger, and all that. It just meant she could beat the boys in gym. Joanie was all rough around the edges, never smooth and shiny like his first girlfriend Becca. She never really looked presentable. Well, she didn't look bad or anything, there was just never any effort behind her look. She didn't even use eyeliner. And Oliver was always complaining about her not using conditioner. Joanie's hair was even getting darker. Lilly thought that would be the deal breaker, but no.

There they were, sitting at a table in the cafeteria, completely ignoring anyone else around them. Lilly gave a small sigh when Miley walked in their direction, but it went unnoticed. Why did they have to sit with them? She had already been putting up with Joanie for four long months, and she knew Miley didn't like her either. Lilly had tried, she really had, but she was getting sick of trying. Something about Joanie just rubbed her the wrong way, and it was not just the kite cutting or the balloon popping. The whole thing was beginning to be unbearable.

Lilly settled into her seat though, and with a burst of inspiration, pulled out her English notes. They had a grammar test at the end of the day, and she could just say she was studying. Grammar was never something she really had a problem with, but nobody else needed to know that. She absentmindedly skimmed the page in her notebook, almost not noticing that Oliver had scooted closer to her and was asking a question.

"What?" She brought her head up, surprised to see him so close to her, and more surprised to see that Joanie and Miley were actually having a civil conversation.

"I said, can I see your notes on how to diagram a sentence? I lost mine."

"Borrow Joanie's."

"Lils, she's in a different English class, remember?"

"Since when does a different class mean there are differences in grammar? It's the same language."

"Lils, come on."

"And isn't her handwriting better than mine anyway?" she asked him sarcastically.

Oliver did not respond, but his eyes widened a little bit. He thought Lilly and Joanie were getting along, so he had no idea where this was coming from. Actually, he may have suspected, at the very back of his mind, where this was coming from. The same place that made him want to beat Matt Marshall to a pulp for standing up Lilly when he was supposed to take her to that stupid dance. Lilly just hadn't acted this way, at least not in front of him, in a long time.

Lilly had to look back down at her notebook and avoid his eyes. She did not want to start an argument about his girlfriend right now. Yelling at him in the middle of the cafeteria was not the best thing for their friendship. She flipped through the pages quickly, finding the one page in her entire notebook that was written in bright green because her blue pen had run out of ink that day, and ripped it from the spiral wire threading through the paper.

"Here," she said shortly, shoving the paper in his direction.

"Thanks."

Oliver moved to take the page from her hand, and the tips of his fingers grazed her own, just barely. Lilly jerked her hand away from her notes and was surprised when she saw him do the same. Her eyes snuck a glance in his direction, but he was staring resolutely down at the paper in front of him, not meeting her gaze.

See, now this was the problem. He was with Joanie, but there were moments. Moments like this where she was sure something was different between the two of them. Truth be told, there may have always been something different about there friendship compared to say, his friendship with Miley. Oliver never jerked his hand away from Miley's.

Lilly may have even had a tiny bit of a crush on him when they were six and she was learning how to read. She remembered watching him learning to put letters into words, and being more interested in watching him than trying to do it herself. She got over it though, having never really known that it was even a crush until much later. She had once suspected, when they were younger, that Oliver may have had a crush on her at one point, but then Miley moved to Malibu, and Lilly was sure she was mistaken. Then, when they started high school, there were times when Lilly was almost positive her oldest friend was flirting with her, but then he made the mistake of looking into Joanie's green eyes, and everything changed. Now, she was pretty sure she was the one with the feelings, not him. It was like they were on two completely different roads, and they never got stopped by the same traffic light. She was stuck at one now, and he just kept on driving.

As soon as he said how much he liked Joanie, all of those little moments she remembered, but had tried to ignore when they were happening, began spiraling around in her head, and Lilly could not stop her mind from wandering whenever she was around him.

Like that time in the seventh grade when he "happened" to find her diary, but supposedly never read it. She always thought that he had because every time the two of them were alone for the first two weeks after he "found" it, his face stayed a very distinct shade of pink. She had never written anything about him in it or anything like that. Just some stuff about stupid school girl crushes on other boys in their classes. She supposed her writing did serve to show Oliver that she was just like other girls though, at least a little bit, that is, if he had read any of it. She quit keeping a diary. Her mom always told her to never write anything down that you didn't want published in a newspaper, it just took her a while to learn that lesson.

Then there was that time that he tried to convince her that she was pretty, even if she had to wear her ugly tire store glasses because her dog ate her contacts. In front of Miley, he told her that looks didn't make a difference, and he looked her right in the eyes. That, however, just made her feel even more ugly, but he explained later that with or without the glasses, she was still Lilly. When she finally got new contacts, he informed her that the glasses made her seem like she was Clark Kent, and when she took them off she was Superman. He thought she should switch it up so she could have an alter ego. She jokingly asked if that meant he was her Lois Lane since she was always saving him from other kids at school. He turned bright red and never answered the question. She only realized what she asked after he had gone home for dinner.

Of course, both of those times had been completely unintentional on her part. She only thought of him as a friend back then. She never thought of him as anything other than Oliver.

She glanced over at him again, watching his mouth move as he traced one of the sentences she had diagramed with his finger. Lilly tuned out the sound of Joanie and Miley talking about some girl in gym that they both disliked. No sounds came out of Oliver's mouth, but she could tell he was going over the differences between adjectives and adverbs. She flicked the paper in front of her, moving on to the next page of her notes. The paper crinkled a little bit, making a rustling noise, and she saw Oliver shoot a quick look at her. He gave her half a smile and she could not help but return it.

That was the thing too. Even when she was mad at him, she was never really mad at him. You couldn't help who you liked. It didn't work that way. Logically, Lilly knew that. She was more mad at herself than she was at him. She had never seen what was right in front of her until it was too late. Somebody else already had him. Looking back now though, she could see moments clearly where the feelings had started. She had just put them out of her mind before now.

Watching Barney Bitman review a Hannah Montana concert was one of the moments that clearly came to mind.

She had been squished on to the couch with Miley and her family, and rather than take a seat in a chair (where Lilly knew from experience you could still see the television), Oliver sat on the floor, right at Lilly's feet. She had crossed one leg over the other to make sure that he had room to lean back on the couch, and she thought the whole thing was perfectly normal. It wasn't like they never sat close together or anything like that. She gave no thought to the look that Miley's brother gave them, figuring he was just being his weird and annoying self.

They had to sit through an entertainment news segment before the part about Hannah actually came on, and by the time they reached the first commercial, Oliver had been drawing invisible pictures on her ankle with his fingers, or playing with the anklet she had been wearing, she wasn't sure which. She just knew she was not going to look down to find out. When she felt his hand on her foot, she had inhaled sharply, but acted like everything was normal when she also felt, rather than saw, Oliver glance up at her. (She was not going to look down was the mantra in her head.) He obviously had not even realized he was doing it, so she ignored the tension in her muscles and the pancakes flipping in her stomach. It was just Oliver, after all, right? She made a crack about him being dumber than a dog to distract herself, but she could feel his fingertips on her skin for days afterward.

And it drove her crazy. Because she was Lilly and he was Oliver. Just Oliver.

Just Oliver, right. She stole another look at him. A few strands of his hair had flopped down into his eyes. He was going to need a haircut soon. Lilly bit her lip, looking back down at her notes. Her eyes barely registered the blue letters splashed across the page. There was the list of things that helped you identify conditional statements, and rules for comma usage, but she had no real interest in them. She gave a little huff of annoyance and turned the paper over. More comma rules.

Oliver asked her a question about one of her sentences, and then he grabbed her pen from her, right out of her hand, to write on the bottom of the page. She tried to snatch it back, but he batted her hand away. If she had not been reading notes he passed her in class for the last few years, she would not have been able to read the sentence. He asked her if she could diagram it, just so he could see what made her decide on certain parts of speech, and she went to work dissecting the nouns from the verbs and the subject from the predicate. He had even thrown in a prepositional phrase and made sure not to let his adverb dangle. Lilly stifled a giggle when that thought popped into her head. She always found that term strange.

Lilly lifted her eyes slightly when she heard Miley ask Joanie if she wanted to hang out with them when they went to the beach on Saturday. Really? She hadn't had enough of Joanie yet? Her eyes fell back to Oliver's sentence though when she heard Joanie's response.

"Can't. Oliver's taking me to a movie."

Lilly could almost picture the smug smile on Joanie's face. She shoved the paper over to Oliver, and the thoughts of his date with Joanie out of her mind.

Unbidden, the idea of going on a date with Oliver herself flew into her head. She tried to push that away too, but really, why bother? It was not like they had never been each other's "date" before.

How could she not have noticed all of the "double dates" the two of them had gone on with Miley and her guy of the week? They went to a Hannah concert with Josh, although that ended up being more like her and Oliver on a date with Josh as the third wheel. That had been incredibly awkward. And the whole Willis fiasco. Again, she and Oliver had ended up hanging out while Miley moped. Then there was the one time they had accompanied Miley on a date with Trey. He took them to a museum. An art museum. Which would have been cool if it was a field trip, or if they weren't 14 and had other things they wanted to do that did not involve whispering to avoid upsetting the other guests. She and Oliver had ended up leaving Miley and Trey to look at the "sophisticated" pieces while they fooled around in the area aimed at kids under the age of ten. She was beginning to sense a theme to Miley's dating history. Not to mention the dozens of dates (at least, it felt like dozens) they had gone on with her and Jake.

She was starting to wonder if this was why more guys in school never asked her out. Maybe they had already thought she and Oliver were together. They had been teased about that enough in middle school, but she had never given much thought to it in high school. It looked like even Miley, at least subconsciously, saw them as two parts of a whole as well. She had never even suggested that either of them find a date to bring with them, never thought that either of them might want to bring someone, just automatically seen them as Lilly and Oliver. There was no Lilly separate from Oliver. Huh. She wondered how Joanie being in the picture was going to affect Miley's dating life.

And, of course, there was the constant teasing, taunting, the occasional pinching or kicking that had been a part of their friendship since she was four. She was once told that their behavior wasn't normal. Friends were apparently not supposed to yell at one another or throw milkshakes at one another or constantly remind one another that they were not all that awesome. Okay, so the reminding him that he was not so awesome was much more her than him. Lilly knew that. But if she didn't remind him of the dork he was, who was going to keep his ego in check? If she did not let him know how crazy or ridiculous he acted, he would think every girl that smiled at him was looking to get in his pants. That is why she was his best friend. She kept him grounded. The sarcastic comments and witty quips that she aimed in his direction when he paid attention to other girls had nothing to do with her being jealous. At least, she never thought so until she saw him in the aftermath of running into Joanie in the hallway at school. She saw the way he looked at Joanie and then she saw red.

When Oliver poked her in the side to get her attention away from her grammar notes again though, she half heartedly smacked his hand away and had another thought. What if this whole time, it had just been the sand box thing?

Little boys who liked little girls, but did not know it, frequently would pull their pig tails or steal their shovels, even knock over their sand castles. Hmm. Had she really been doing the same thing since she was four years old to him and never even noticed? Of course, if she was doing it, then so was he.

The proof was there. He was, again, poking her in the side, a little harder now.

"What?" Lilly snapped her head around to look at him fully this time.

"It's Friday," he informed her quietly.

"So?"

Lilly was wondering why he was whispering.

"So… Batman marathon at my house tonight?"

The look on his face was hopeful and Lilly gave a questioning glance at their other best friend and his girlfriend.

"Just me and you?" she asked him, her voice even quieter than his.

"Well, and my brother. I'm trying to prove to him that Batman is a better hero than Superman." Oliver nodded his head emphatically at that, and Lilly couldn't help but giggle. Oliver never gave up on the caped crusader.

"Sure."

He moved a little bit closer to her, just a little bit. She knew it was only so they could share her notes when he pointed out something on the page, but Lilly could not help but notice that their hips were touching, his left leg resting against her right. She shot a quick look over at Miley and Joanie again, but neither of them were paying attention. Though she tried to quash the thought, it still popped into her mind that if she were Oliver's girlfriend, she would probably not like it if he was pressed this close to another girl in the cafeteria. Not like it? Who was she kidding? That girl would've stopped breathing.

Oh, well. If Joanie did not care, Lilly was not going to worry about it. She was just going to enjoy it. She may have been avoiding close contact for the last few months, but why should she? Oliver had been her best friend long before he was Joanie's boyfriend. It didn't matter that being this close to him was messing with her concentration. It also did not matter that every time his arm brushed hers she could feel sparks dancing along her skin. She shifted her body so she turned slightly in Oliver's direction, trying to focus on the question he asked her.

Lilly looked back up into his eyes and he held her gaze for a moment. Something flickered there, and it wasn't just the light reflecting off the brown of his iris. Just a moment. But that was all it took really. Her friendship with Oliver was built on little moments like that. Moments that made her feel as if there was no one else there. She knew he felt the same way, just not right now. They had never had the same feelings at the same time. Lilly would just have to wait for him to catch up to her.


End file.
